Games in My Head II: Give Peace a Chance?
Posted by Rob Herman at September 10th, 2006
I’ve had the skeleton of another game kicking around in my head for a couple of days now, and figure, heck, might as well share. Right now it’s just a set of bullet points because I don’t have a clear picture for how it will fit together just yet. The working title in my mind is “Give Peace a Chance?”
- Players: Three to somewhere between four and six. The dynamics I hope for won’t work with two. As for the upper limit, we’ll see how much of an issue crowding and a long time between turns are.
- Setup: A board—either a hex or square grid or a large assortment of regions/provinces. I think I would like about 12-15 regions per player, so about 40-60 total. Like Catan, regions produce a certain resource and have a widely varying quality. Unlike Catan, regions are controlled and can be captured. Control is exerted through meeples which double as soldiers when it comes down to conflict—you can have more than one meeple in a region.
- The board might be fixed or might be randomized in some way. Randomization gives extra replayability to the game, which is good, but it might be at cross purposes with making sure every player has surpluses of some resources and shortages of others.
- Goal: Unknown. It may be to control a certain region or collection of regions, to collect a certain number or resources, or, preferably, something altogether more original. I would like the goal to be a race or struggle for a certain Thing, rather than a victory point showdown.
- Play Points:
- Different resources should be worth different amounts to different players at different times.
- To encourage players to specialize, there may be an “economy of scale” factor that makes it very difficult to produce just what you need of everything. You should have to either fight or trade to get all your needs met.
- Trade is vitally important, because you’ll have a surplus of some resources and want for others. However, you have to work to set it up—it’s not free. Perhaps you have to buy a caravan or convoy token; perhaps it’s easier if you share a border.
- Aggression is tactical, not strategic in nature. Wars of conquest aren’t worth the effort; you attack because you need a specific resource In A Hurry and can’t pay the price to trade for it.
- Being attacked should drive you to aggression yourself—perhaps it gives you a bonus to your own attacks in the immediate aftermath. However, because of the varying values of resources, the reaction to being attacked should not necessarily be “I want that back!” but “what can I best take, and from whom, with this offensive power I now have?” I would rather not include a heavy-handed “no takebacks” rule.
- Resource investment will not be military vs. industrial in nature but rather short term vs. long term. In other words, can I use this short term purchase to build the momentum to make bigger long term gains, or should I just start a safe investment right now?
Something that you will probably want to incorporate from real life is the whole guns/butter production pay off system. If you aren’t familiar with it, it works like this:
Country A is really good at making guns, and bad at butter. If it spends half its effort on making guns, and half on butter, it can make 10 guns, and 200 lbs of butter. However, if it tries to make all guns, it can make 20 guns, and 0 lbs of butter. If it tries to only make butter, it can make 0 guns, and 400 lbs of butter. *
Country B is really good at making butter, but not very good at making guns. It can make:
0 guns, 800 lbs of butter.
2 guns, 400 lbs of butter.
4 guns, 0 lbs of butter.
Now, assuming perfectly free trade and full coordination, it makes sense for both to fully specialize in what they are good at, and then trade. In a very simple case, A will make 20 guns, and trade 10 for 400 lbs of butter. This will result in:
A: 10 guns, 400 lbs of butter
B: 10 guns, 400 lbs of butter
In this case, both countries end up with more than what they could possibly start out with. Most countries won’t fully specialize(see USA sugar beet farming) because they fear, among other things, being unable to fully cooperate with every trading partner.
*This assumes a straight trade off line, which is almost never the case. The economy of scale dictates the production curve will accelerate more than a straight line as you get closer to 100% For the purpose of a board game, I could see this represented with flash cards, listing “economic effort” from 0-100% by 5% or 10%, and the number output next to it, like this:
10->5
20->11
30->17
50->24
60->31
70->39
80->47
90->56
100->65
Making two other cards with two other scales, could give a player something they are good, average, and bad at creating. Based on their part of the board, or randomly preselected, or whatever, they then assign one card to each of the three things that they can produce. Every turn, they have 100 points of economic effort to distribute any way they want.